I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
Montaigne, Essays, III
The whole excuse for a page like this, said four hundred years early.
For a long time I underlined books and then never found the lines again. This is where they go now — copied out by hand, a few at a time, so that reading leaves something behind besides the memory of having read.
A commonplace book is an old, unglamorous habit: you keep the sentences that stop you, and you write next to them why they did. Nothing here is complete or meant to be. It grows slowly, in the evenings, when a page is worth the trouble of copying.
Recent margins
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Kept it on the time shelf. Read it on a day I had wasted.
Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.
Thoreau, Walden
More on the solitude shelf.
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.
Thoreau, Walden
Filed under reading. A reproach I keep needing.
The rest is sorted onto shelves — the collections.